Pain to Stop Pain
by Five Minutes Til Bedtime
Summary: When Kurt discovers his mutation it isn't a pleasant experience. Turns out his life merely wasn't meant to be. One-shot.


Title: **Pain to Stop Pain.**

Summary: When Kurt discovers his mutation it isn't a pleasant experience. Turns out his life merely wasn't meant to be. One-shot.

Fandom: Glee

Word Count: 1,918

* * *

This first time it happens, Kurt doesn't know what to think.

What he feels though, _that _he remembers. There was the fear. The awful, crippling fear as Karofsky's smashes his lips against Kurt's – demanding, _taking, _what isn't his to have. He feels violated in every sense of the word. He feels powerless. Most of all he feels angry. Later, in a dim library several months later, he'll realize that these emotions are likely what triggered the next part. At the time though, he's unable to think at all, because the heat comes next. It pumps through his veins, makes his whole body flush. It feels like pure power and Kurt is suddenly not afraid anymore.

But Karofsky is. He stumbles back from Kurt like a frightened animal, eyes wide, pupils expanded. For a brief moment, Kurt thinks he sees a bright light coming from his attacker's mouth, but then Karofsky turns and flees and Kurt is left standing in an empty locked room with a hand pressed to his still tingling lips and the question of '_what just happened?_' repeating itself in his head.

* * *

The second time is even worse, a fact that is made even more horrible as it should have been the greatest moment of his life.

He's sitting on the piano bench, tapping out a little tune, when Blaine barges in, a mass of gelled hair and too wide smile and puppy-like exuberance. There's talk. Words are exchanged. Then Blaine leans in for the kiss and –

Heat. Warmth. Explosion.

The world is Blaine's lips and it has just exploded. Stars are everywhere. Kurt can feel everything at once. The beat of Blaine's pulse. The footsteps of hundreds of students in the halls. The tension in the piano chords. It lasts forever and it is still too short.

And then Blaine is jerking away and the connection is broken and the last thing Kurt sees before the shorter boy flees the room with frightened eyes is a bright white light disappearing down his throat.

If he had believed in God, he would have wondered what he was being punished for.

* * *

Kurt doesn't believe in coincidences. Something is wrong with him and he needs to find out _now _what it is before he graduates high school alone and a loser.

He scourges the school library and finds nothing. Searches the county library and eventually finds a book on mutants. Kurt lives in Lima, Ohio and such things simply aren't talked about in so-called polite society. It doesn't take long for Kurt to connect the dots and realize that he's experiencing the emergence of a mutation.

Just great, he thinks, gay and a mutant. What more can people hate me for?

But Hummels don't give up and don't back down and Kurt continues to research until he comes up with a name and an address.

* * *

He waits until the summer and then drives his Navigator all the way to New York. He tells his dad that he is visiting Blaine at his family's cottage. Burt buys it even though Kurt hasn't brought Blaine over to his house since the disastrous kiss months ago and the two boys rarely talk, much less spend summer together.

Three days into his summer and Kurt sits in an antique chair opposite a bald man in wheelchair.

"You're mutation is unique, Kurt," the man, Professor Xavier, says staring at him intently. He'd already spoken in Kurt's mind (something that Kurt was _not _thrilled about) so he'll settle for the probing look so long as the bald man keeps his thoughts to himself. "If honed properly you could be very powerful."

Kurt just inclines his head. He already knows this simply by the power that flows through his body when it happens. He sets his tea down on the desk and looks the Professor in the eye.

"Yes, but can it be _turned off_?"

* * *

The answer, it turns out, is no. Kurt spends three weeks in the mansion kissing more people than he would care to admit. At first they just do tests. Hook him up to machines and have random people (boys and girls) kiss him. He is mortified at first, but that is a feeling that quickly wears off to frustration.

The people he kiss all describe it to pressing their face to the sun. They smile and tease him but no one ever volunteers to lock lips again. His touch is too painful.

The Professor teaches him to expand his powers. By the end he can make it so a mere brush of his finger tips and a bit of white light causes the receiver to scream bloody murder. He knows it disturbs the teachers - it disturbs him too. No one else seems to have a mutation so blatantly aimed at causing pain. He's a freak among freaks.

But nothing he tries can turn off the pain he causes with a kiss and at the end of the summer, despite the Professor's protests, he leaves the mansion.

* * *

He doesn't go back to Lima. Over the summer he'd completed all of the required classes to graduate and accepts the diploma given to him when he leaves.

He sends a letter to his dad that confesses everything. He tells him that he'll come home when he's ready and that to send his love to Carole and the glee club.

He thinks his dad will understand, even if he isn't sure how.

* * *

Kurt travels around America. He finds a way to support himself when he accidentally stumbles upon a mugging in progress and acts before he thinks. He _touches _the potential robber and holds him until the would-be victim runs from the alley screaming. When he lets go, the mugger is too much in a pain-induced haze to realize when Kurt take the money out of his wallet and calls the police on the robber's own cell phone. From then on, it is simple to find money.

* * *

To support his job, Kurt sticks mainly to big cities with high crime rates. It isn't until Gotham that he hits his first bump in the road. Kurt has heard of Batman and Robin, of course, but hearing of and seeing in person are too very different things. Kurt is being cornered by three thugs, the fourth one writhing in pain from when Kurt had touched him, when a shadow drops out of the sky.

There is a flash of movement, black and green and yellow, and then Kurt is left standing against a wall with four thugs on the ground out-cold and the most famous duo in the word watching him carefully.

"Holy - !"

Kurt jumps, startled, when Robin speaks. The teen sounds way too young and way too surprised. Then Kurt sees that the masked teen is kneeling next to the thug Kurt had put out and winces.

"What did you do to him?"

Batman's deep, intense voice sends shivers down Kurt's spine. He's frightened and he isn't ashamed to admit it. There is something dark – terrifying – about Batman. Even though Kurt knows with a single touch he could have the hero screaming, he can't imagine having the guts to lay a finger on the man.

"I touched him," Kurt finally answers, his voice small. He is finding it impossible to look anywhere near the hero and has instead directed his attention to his hands, which are trembling. "My touch…it _hurts _people," he confessed as the silence became pressing. "I only ever touch criminals. I swear."

Batman and Robin exchange looks that Kurt doesn't see.

"Mutant?" asks Robin. Kurt nods. He finds it easier to meet the teen's eyes. "Can you control it?"

"Mostly," Kurt replies honestly.

They confer for a few minutes longer before Batman hands him a cell phone and a warning to stay out of Gotham. Kurt takes them both at face value and doesn't return.

* * *

While on the road out of Gotham it dawns on Kurt that he, like Batman and Robin, should be protecting his identity. If word of his powers ever got out he can be sure that people would hunt him down. Even worse – they could hurt his family.

Despite everything he has lost, Kurt hasn't abandoned his sense of fashion. He refuses to wear any sort of nylon and instead begins to wear simple black slacks, a black tie, and a plain black mask when he goes out looking for trouble. Looking the way he does, affluent and full of money, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to attract criminals.

* * *

It doesn't take long for his name to become known throughout the world. Kurt, as much as it once seemed impossible, has found pleasure in his nomadic life style. He's been to Paris and Italy and Japan on the money of bad guys to picked the wrong person to mess with.

He isn't big news. There are too many metahumans appearing from the woodwork for Kurt to matter much. Where they do mention him, it is with mystery and a hint of fear. He _hurts _people, bad people, but people all the same.

He avoids other people like him, but he can't always escape them. Kurt's powers don't make him any faster or stealthier so it happens more than he'd like.

They greet him with false smiles and wary eyes because he'd an unknown. Neither hero nor villain. He had no name and he has no past.

And he causes pain so they fear him for that alone.

* * *

He fights as a hero only once, when there is mayhem in the streets and everyone – hero, villain, neutral – all are fighting for their planet against an alien force determined to exterminate them.

He makes it to the front of the battle field where those men and women in spandex glory. Their eyes widen when they see him, but their faces are grim in acceptance when they see enemies fall screaming with a simple brush of his fingertips.

In the end, he single-handedly falls an entire fleet of invaders.

In the end, they approach him with offers to join them – S.H.I.E.L.D, The Avengers, The Justice League, Magneto.

He turns them down flat and vanishes back into the streets.

* * *

When the cure is found, Kurt stands across the street and watches as the line of mutants goes in one door and out the other, changed irrevocably.

He stands there for days, eyes following the exit doors. Some come out crying in joy, others in anguish, some don't come out at all. His feet waver between stepping off the curb. He is right there. The cure is _right there_. It is all he's ever wanted – a chance to be free and _love _someone.

His feet won't move. After many days, he feels a hand on his shoulder and sees his father standing there.

His father, whom he loves, has found him.

Kurt turns away and goes home.

He won't stay for long, and when he goes he disappears back into a word of crime and horror and pain that terrify most people, but the cure never temps him again.

Though he never fully understands why, he comes to accept that his life will always be one filled with pain. And if his pain can stop others from causing more pain, then he'll use it. He isn't a hero – not really – but he saves people any way.

Saves them from the life that he lives. Saves them from pain.


End file.
